gms | German Medical Science

Question/Objective: IMCert (Immune Modulation Certificate for postgraduate students acquired by blended learning) is an approved proposal in the “Capacity building in the field of higher education” Erasmus plus program. We started a transnational cooperation between Egypt, France, Greece and Germany. IMCert synergizes with the United Nations initiative of sustainable development goal 4 to develop a national postgraduate certificate in immunology in five Egyptian Universities. We implemented different workshops, as the process of developing the postgraduate certificate program requires a series of workshops and corrective feedback between the teachers and the immunology experts. In this study we want to present how we trained 50 immunology experts in our first 4-day curriculum development workshop.

Methods: 50 experts from five Egyptian universities (Al-Azhar, Cairo, Ain-Shams, Damanhour and Aswan University) attended our first virtual curriculum development workshop. The experts had backgrounds in Medicine (21), Pharmacy (18) or Natural Sciences (11) and 33 of them were female. The teachers were experts in medical education from Germany, France and Egypt.

Our objectives covered the application of the Kern cycle [1] and the DeCoRe plus methodology [2]. We taught writing smart goals and objectives and filling in a module description while using interactive methods like wooclap. In our concept we trained giving effective and constructive feedback towards each other. In small groups the participants focused mainly on Kern steps 1 to 4 and got 360-degree feedback [3] to every step. We discussed teaching and learning methods e.g. blended learning, flipped classroom, hybrid teaching and interactive methods. Kern steps 5 and 6 will be included in future workshops.

Results: The participants rated the workshop with 1.24±0.53 (mean ± SD on a 6-point Likert scale, 1=excellent, 6=terrible) overall. Teachers were rated between 1.02 and 1.3. Experts rated their preparedness for developing a curriculum after our workshop with a mean value of 1.7±0.91 (mean±SD). They liked most interactions and learning about/with feedback and there was nothing they did not like. All participants wanted to have a second workshop.

Discussion: Our participants efficiently constructed a curriculum at national level, in a detailed and optimized way. To professionalize them in higher education requirements we developed different workshops, e.g. several workshops in the field of curriculum development, teaching and learning and assessment. In all these workshops we applied 360-degree [3] constructive feedback again and again between the teachers and the immunology experts to increase the participants’ performance. Professionalism in curriculum development is an extremely required ability. Our study showed that field experts appreciate specific preparation for educational responsibilities.

Take Home Message: The alignment of workshop objectives to the specific needs of teachers guarantees their satisfaction.